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My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag f
by nyreed 3y ago
My problem with Joplin is that on my M1 Macbook pro it really shows how much of an Electron app it really is, in the worst ways. Extreme memory use and UI lag for an application which displays text. That said, aside from performance it's quite satisfying to use. It's very simple and does its job well.
I recently migrated to Obsidian and although the learning curve is steeper, I'm quite happy with the results.
- anonzzzies 3y agoI went from Notion to Joplin for note taking: I drop 1000s of images in a note and annotate them and publish them. Notion crashed all the time; so badly that support apologised and had to delete things for me. Joplin has 0 issues with it; it scrolls super fast, is a pleasure to work with. Also on a m1. I cannot say I noticed any bad behaviour compared to others, included Obsidian.
- theshrike79 3y agoI went from Notion and Joplin to Obsidian mostly because Obsidian stores stuff as regular files on my filesystem and I can easily interact with them with external programs and scripts. Joplin, while being open source itself, has a "proprietary"[1] storage format I can't be arsed to figure out how to interact with. [1] Meaning non-standard in this case, Joplin is the only software using Joplin's storage method
- moneywoes 3y agois there anything with a lightweight learning curve akin to Obsidian that uses a accessible format?
- theshrike79 3y agoAny text editor with markdown support should work. Just VS Code with a Markdown viewer is a decent replacement. You don't _need_ all of the fancy plugins that Obsidian has, but some of them are genuinely useful.
- stavros 3y agoIt's "just" a SQLite database, I wrote a small Python script to extract my Joplin notes to a static site: https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/ https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/
- theshrike79 3y agoOn the other hand Obsidian markdown with front-matter can be fed pretty much directly to a static site generator. Sqlite does give some speed improvements and makes searching easier.
- anonzzzies 3y agoIt’s SQLite; arguable the format most fast custom storage format requiring software (games notably) should use instead of rolling their own.
- rubymamis 3y agoThat’s exactly why I’m building a note-taking app in Qt C++ and QML that is vastly more performant than other note-taking apps[1]. This degradation of software by web apps shows in the lack of optimal resource utilization of even one of the most powerful chips of recent times. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/ https://www.get-plume.com/
- ukuina 3y agoPlume looks neat! What is the pricing model you have in mind?
- rubymamis 3y agoThanks! It will be a subscription model. $25 paid yearly or $3 monthly (that’s the idea for now).
- bleomycin 3y agoPlume looks very interesting! One place I personally find many apps in this category fall down is their ability to handle pdf’s embedded or attached within notes gracefully. This applies to desktop and mobile apps. This may be a slightly weird use case but I accumulate tons of pdf’s that are often relevant to my notes and want them easily embedded and viewable in a first class way. Obsidian is a great example of how not to handle a pdf locking it to a small portion of the window and not allowing it to be full screened. Forcing the user to dump all of their pdf’s into something like google drive locked away from the rest of their notes is a crappy experience and h fortunately keeps me using apps like evernote purely for this functionality.
- rubymamis 3y agoThanks! Hmm, I've seen many open-source Qt apps integrate PDF support, so I guess I can study them. I'm adding this to the to-do list. How do you usually add a PDF to your notes? Drag and drop? What's the ideal way you look to interact with it? You said no full-screen, so what it does look like?
- 3y ago
- Liquix 3y agoDoes Obsidian feature a way to seamlessly sync between devices that doesn't rely on a propreitary service or external tool (Syncthing)?
- SteeCee 3y agoObsidian has a built in sync feature if you pay for it. https://obsidian.md/sync https://obsidian.md/sync
- refactorguy 3y agoEvery time I see a post about a note-taking app, Obsidian is mentioned in the comments. I don't know if the app is really good, or if those are just paid comments. At this point I'm not even surprised anymore, especially when conversations always end with a mention of Obsidian Sync.
- grantc 3y agoIt's because there are two ways to sync content across devices, paid sync through Obsidian vs. git. Given sync is a p0 feature, it seems logical that both get mentioned when the question arises. Also, the app's really good, and I pay for Sync -- git works well, but it's a bit clumsier on iOS. Never posted a paid comment in my life.
- iamtedd 3y agoThat's not all the ways to sync. I share the vault folder between devices with syncthing. Free and open source.
- bccdee 3y agoIt's the biggest & most popular app in the note-taking space. It's closed-source, which I don't love, and I've tried to look for alternatives, but there just isn't anything else that's as good as Obsidian. In a situation like that, you don't need to pay people to talk about your product. People will evangelize it on their own.
- oven9342 3y agoI wish I could compile those electron apps from source à la FreeBSD’s ports or whatever. I’d rather have the laptop compiling for a few days than using electron
- NoahKAndrews 3y agoHow does compiling from source help you avoid electron?
- vunderba 3y agoyeah, it goes to show you that Electron based apps can be done in a reasonably performant way but it does require extra care/attention as Obsidian is an electron app as well. I have about 13,000 notes (with embedded media PNGs, MP4s, etc) across 50 folders/subfolders on my Mac M1 and searching across all notes in Obsidian is for all intents and purposes instantaneous (less than a second).
- lbotos 3y agoJoplin released an ARM build a few months back -- so if you were using the pre-arm build it was bad, so just throwing this out there for folks who maybe had similar experiences -- make sure you are using the arm build (it should happen automatically now) Disclaimer: I've contributed to Joplin in the past, and I use it dozens of times a day with no big speed complaints.
- stavros 3y agoI use it on Linux and it's always really snappy and a pleasure to use.